Students and screens: a good or a bad friendship? A longitudinal case study for Spain

TV and video games have been popularly considered as harmful for students' academic performance, to the extent that they are usually related to a sedentary way of living. However, although there is a great amount of empirical research on this issue, most of the evidence is based on purely correlational analyses. The current research intends to go further from correlational studies and analyse the influence that the time students devote to watch TV and play video games has on different measures of academic progression from primary to secondary education; specifically, students' scores and their likelihood of grade retention. Departing from rich census and longitudinal data for the region of Andalusia (in Spain) we have applied a time fixed-effects analysis. Opposite to common intuition, we find that the time students spend watching TV has a positive but decreasing influence on students' academic achievement, and playing video games also presents a positive influence on mathematics until a certain threshold (1 hour), becoming negative for students' academic performance when they spend too much time. However, students' likelihood of grade retention does not seem to be influenced by the time spent on TV and video games.